The Decency Police

WATCHDOG: Bozell says his group has doubled its size in seven years

CHRIS MUELLER / REDUX

• Share

(7 of 8)

James Steyer, a law professor at Stanford University, describes himself as "a progressive parent who lives in San Francisco." That didn't stop him from founding in 2003 Common Sense Media, which runs a website that rates TV shows, video games, music, books and websites for age appropriateness. "I'm no right-winger or religious ideologue," he says. "This is a nonpartisan issue." Kathleen Richardson of Des Moines, Iowa, is executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and the mother of three kids, 12, 16 and 18. "Here I'm promoting free speech and the values of the First Amendment professionally," she says, "and yet it drives me crazy that my kids are swimming around in this pop culture that is becoming a sort of sewer."

But it's not only politicians and activists who experience cognitive dissonance on indecency--so do everyday citizens. They want protection from smut yet don't use the V chip. They talk about competing with pop culture to parent their children yet give kids TVs and computers in their bedrooms. They rail against sex and violence in entertainment, yet--as a group, anyway--reward it and punish the alternatives. The most wholesome new network show of last fall was CBS's Clubhouse, a sweet drama about a teenage bat boy for a baseball team, executive-produced by Mel (The Passion of the Christ) Gibson. It was canceled by November. Desperate Housewives is still going strong.

In an exclusive TIME poll, more than half the respondents say there's too much violence, profanity and sex on TV, but most say they aren't personally offended by it and don't want that content banned. Slightly more than half believe the FCC should be stricter, but 66% say it overreacted to Janet Jackson. Yet what may seem like confusion--or just hypocrisy--may also be something too often missing from the indecency debate: subtlety.

When you talk to people about what bothers them in pop culture--if anything does--they tend not to talk about discrete, FCC-finable offenses. They talk about video games, ads, innuendos, magazine covers--things that the FCC doesn't police or that are so nebulous and environmental as to be unpoliceable in a free society. They don't want absolute rules. They want boundaries: they just want to know where the cultural deep end and the kiddie pool are.

In the classic definition, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Today some people feel mugged by pop culture. It's not just watching a football game and getting flashed by a singer's breast. It's the unwanted porn e-mail or the hamburger commercial with a woman lasciviously riding a mechanical bull. It's watching a sports program with your young child and hearing the host blurt, "A______!" Tim Tutt, a single, third-grade teacher in Des Moines, calls himself "a liberal, anticensorship person." But he was furious when he visited a website for his students and up popped an ad with a sexy blond. "Boy, did I lose control of the class for a moment," he says. "Then I felt this conservative rage within me--'Why was that necessary?'" People care, in other words, about context as well as content.

WHO SETS THE STANDARD?